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SPEEC 






HON. HENRY WINTER DAVIS 



AT 



CO:tsrCEET H^LL, 



PHILADELPHIA, 



September 24, 1863 



LV 






SPEECH 



HON. HENRY WINTER DAVIS. 



Fellow-Citizens of the United States : 

The election that is now pending in Pennsylvania and that which 
is pending in the State of Maryland, will go very far, though per- 
haps in very unequal degrees, to determine the Presidential contest 
of next year. In my judgment, the election of a Democratic Presi- 
dent, or if he perfer the term, a conservative President, will be the 
end of the war, and with the end of the war, in my judgment, the 
end of the Union of these States. It will be the end, likewise of 
that great result, though not the original object of the war — the 
change of the social relations in the rebellious States, which have 
occasioned our present disturbances. (Applause.) 

If it be of any moment to any one here that the conduct of the 
National affairs shall remain in the hands of those who represent 
the principles which now preside over their conduct, if there be any 
one here who thinks that the war ought to be continued until every 
rebellious weapon sinks in submission to the National authority, if 
there be any one who thinks it is worth while, after having had 
experience of the mischiefs that grow from a vicious social organi- 
zation, that we shall not be twice jeoparded by the same cause when 
we have the opportunity to root it out, let that person bear in mind 
that on the vote of Pennsylvania this fall depends, in a great mea- 
sure, that result. (Applause.) 

The gentleman who is competing with your present distinguished 
and patriotic executive for the position of Governor of this Com- 
monwealth does not leave you in the doubts with which Mr. Sey- 
mour and other gentlemen less candid or more prudent veil their 



4 

opiuion. Here, we understand our opponents formally declare 
that the Democratic party alone can restore the Union ; that it 
cannot be restored by arms ; that it can only be restored by peace 
and conciliation ; and that they are the only persons who can so 
restore it. Tiiey were in power when the rebellion broke out. 
Why did they not arrest it? (Great applause.) They had all the 
factions that called themselves Democratic, united ; could have pre- 
vented the election of the gentleman who they now say has brought 
on the war. Why did they not subordinate their internal party 
differences to the patriotic purpose of averting an otherwise inevi- 
table war ? (Applause.) They say that they alone can restore the 
Union, and by peace. Then vvhy did they break It up ? ("That's 
it," and applause.) They are very fond of asking who is responsi- 
ble for the war, and I take great pleasure in responding, the Demo- 
cratic party that ruled the country for thirty years. (Great ap- 
plause.) And I say that, with the kindliest regard, with the utmost 
respect, with the greatest deference for the honest members of that 
party, who, whatever may have been their judgments before the 
rebellion broke out, saw by the flames of civil war, the dangerous 
path they trod and joined their life-long political opponents in the 
right path. They who now arrogate to themselves the reputation 
and the name of the Democratic party, are the mere refuse that 
remained behind when the patriotic elements withdrew for the de- 
fence of the nation. (Great applause.) If, when numbering many 
of the great men, many of the good men, many of the patriotic 
men, many of the eminent statesmen of the country, wise in council 
and firm in action, they could not prevent the war, who will believe 
that this wretched remnant can stop the war? (Laughter and ap- 
plause.) Why did the South rebel ? Because they had lost the 
majority of the North. There were a majority still at the North 
calling themselves Democrats, but they were Democrats that would 
not do what the Southern men desired. They committed themselves 
so far in favor of the Southern policy at the North, that they lost 
the confidence of their fellow-citizens of the North, and with their 
confidence lost their votes ; and when they lost their votes, the 
Southern men could no longer depend upon them to protect their 
peculiar interest, they smote those that had been their humble ser- 
vants for two generations past. (Applause.) They taught Southern 
Democrats that they could ask no humiliation which would not be 
yielded ; and that all who were not Democrats were Abolitionists — 
stood compurgators for every lie, and enabled them to imprint their 
hate and fear on the minds of the Southern people — and now that 
they are spurned by their masters — now the wretched remnant of 
these discarded allies, (laughter) these worn-out tools of a despotic 
power that has been driven to rebellion ; these men venture to as- 
sume to lift the niighty mace of the old Democratic party, and say: 



" We can restore the broken and shattered Union that all combined 
could not preserve." (Laughter and applause.) Wlij, men of the 
United States, what is the rebellion ? The Democratic party in 
arms in the South and in sympathy in the North. (Great applause.) 
What Democrat does not sympathize with his " Southern brctliern ?" 
What Seymour does not speak of them as his "friends?" (Ap- 
plause.) They restore the Union by pacific means ! That means 
that they will stop the war. We need no one to tell us that. They 
opposed it in its beginning ; they have maligned it to the present 
day ; they have embarrassed its progress ; they have villificd those 
that conduct it ; they have struggled against every measure essen- 
tial to its conduct. Place them in power, would they not effectuate 
their own purpose, and let it drop ? Of course, peace is their 
policy ! 

Opposed to the war ! Of course they are. James Buchanan and 
those that stood around him and those that followed him, said, "it 
is unconstitutional." (Laughter.) Are they honorable men, and 
can they disavow the words of their chief; or, considering the value 
the Democrats have always placed upon consistency when consistent 
with their interest, are they likely to evade the obligation that they 
have assumed, to treat it as unconstitutional, and therefore to 
stop it? 

Who is their candidate for Governer in Ohio? Is Yallandigham 
for restoring the Union by suppressing the rebellion ? Who was 
their candidate in Connecticut? The namesake of the New York 
Seymour, and better than the namesake, an honest avower of the 
opinions which the other dishonestly concealed, lie said that peace 
and not war, the arrest of bloodshed and not the suppression of 
rebellion, were the highest purposes that any statesman could pro- 
claim for himself. Where have they elected a Legislature that has 
not let the cloven foot appear ? What say my friends from New 
Jersey, that I see around me — is Governor Parker for the war or 
against it ? Is the Legislature of New Jersey for or against peace 
resolutions ? Is the Legislature of Illinois for or against the war ? 
Is the Legislature of Indiana for or against the war ? Where have 
the resolutions in favor of an immediate armistice come from ? 
Where have the resolutions proposing the meeting of a disloyal con- 
vention in the city of Louisville come from ? What great leading 
man, calling himself a Democrat and not now supporting the Admin- 
istration, avows himself in favor of prosecuting the war to the bitter 
end, till the banners of rebellion trail in the dust ? Let him be 
named — who is he? 

John Van Buren thought it would be worth while to go to Rich- 
mond, and then to proclaim an armistice. And what is to be done 
with the armies beyond it ? 

They all have profound, perfect confidence in an amnesty. An 



amnesty to men ia arms, your equals on the battle-field, as often 
victorious as you are, inferior in numbers and resources, but nerved 
to desperation in a gigantic conflict ! What is an armistice but some- 
thing for them to laugh at ? 

Peace ! Scarcely had Mr. Seward put forth another circular of 
ill-starred prophecies, than as if to show you how far " our Southern 
brethren" are from dreaming of peace, they rush two to one upon 
Rosecrans and make him struggle to hold his ground even. Judge 
Woodward, I suppose, would appear upon the battle-field at Chat- 
tanooga with a laurel wreath on his head and an olive branch in his 
hand, (laughter) bidding back the foe from that terrific strife. Do 
they suppose, gentlemen, that the American people are born fools? 
Do they suppose that their word, instigated by the desire to attain 
power, will make the people believe what every man in all the rebel 
region, in every place of authority loudly denies. Vallandigham 
told us that everywhere in his progress through the nether regions 
he heard nothing but cries of peace and union. Why did he not 
name the man in authority that hinted at any terms that they were 
willing to accept or even to consider ? Did he not know from the 
temper of the people of this country, their earnest desire for peace, 
their weariness of the war, the exhaustion of their resources, the 
harrowing of their affections by the desolation of the family circle, 
that any man who would go to the South and bring back terms of 
peace of any kind, even touching on and bordering upon humilia- 
tion, would receive the acclaim of two-thirds of the American peo- 
ple ? Would he be now skulking over the border in Canada, or 
would he not rather be treading triumphantly over the heads of 
thousands of admiring fellow-citizens, as they hail him the harbinger 
of the peace that he proclaimed ? His silence is the falsification of 
his wretched invention. (Applause.) 

Somebod}'^ whispered over the Rappahannock the other day that 
peace was near. They found out the only officer that had been 
upon the banks that day, and language cannot exceed the epithets 
of scorn and hatred with which he received the mere suggestion of 
peace — except upon terms that every Democrat is willing to re- 
ceive to-morrow. (Laughter and applause.) The line of the Ohio, 
and the Mississippi, and the Potomac, the payment of the expenses 
of the war and damages for our outrages — who is ready for that 
here? ("None," "None,'") — the surrender of Western Virginia 
and her heroic loyalists ? ("Never,") — the yielding of Kentucky 
that they have insolently called a member of their Confederacy, 
though no officer would dare set foot within her loyal limits ? — the 
return of the disenthralled and rescued martyrs of Eastern Ten- 
nessee ? (Great applause,) — now that daylight is dawning on 
North Alabama and North Georgia, the plunging them into hope- 
less and endless night — the return of Missouri to the domination 



that undertook to drive her from the ncgi.s of the Union ! These 
are the terms and the only terms any man has over hoard uttered 
above a whisper within the Southern country ? If Judge Wood- 
ward and his like mean that in the face of these terms they are 
ready to stop the war, then eternal will be the disgrace of Penn- 
sylvania, if, knowing that, she elect him for her Chief Magistrate. 
(Applause.) If he do not mean to accept these, the only terms 
that have ever been uttered, then the people of Pennsylvania de- 
serve to be placed in their own hospitals if they accept a man to 
regulate and govern their Commonwealth who says he is for peace 
and an armistice when these are the only terms that are possible. 
(Applause.) An armistice for what purpose ? To argue with 
maniacs ? to debate on the field of battle ? or to realize the darling 
idea of the Democratic disunionists, to palsy the arm of the United 
States, to arrest the impetus of its onward advance, to give the 
people in rebellion time to breathe, the men stricken to the knee 
time to gain their feet, the men whose resources are exhausted an 
opportunity to replace them, to break up the blockade, to open 
their ports to foreign commerce, to give them the recognition that 
could never be withdrawn, not merely of belligerents, but of parties 
holding a position competent to deal on equal terms with the 
United States. How long after an armistice would the recognition 
of the Southern Confederacy be delayed by England or France ? 
How would they remain idle during the conferences, how long delay 
to make their arrangements, not merely to mediate between Powers, 
but to intervene in arms? The mere proposal of the armistice 
reveals the traitorous purpose that remains behind it. 

[At this point the officers and men stationed at Camp Cadwala- 
der, being those detailed from the Army of the Potomac to look 
after conscripts, entered the room bearing flags designating their 
respective regiments. Their appearance was hailed by a tremen- 
dous outburst of enthusiasm. The band played "• Yankee Doodle," 
and the audience rose to their feet and cheered vociferously for 
several minutes. When silence was restored, Mr. Davis resumed :] 

My Friends, the reception that you have given our soldiers of 
the Army of the Potomac shows that you at least are for no armis- 
tice, (great applause,) that you at least appreciate, without the 
necessity of argument from me, that an armistice is equivalent to 
the end of the war, and that the end of the war leaves the South 
independent. We can all now see where our opponents stand. 
They are opposed to every measure for conducting the war. Ah ! 
they are opposed to the Conscription Act ; yet they do not volun- 
teer. How can we get soldiers? They are opposed to the ^300 
clause in it ; yet they have generally paid the ^300. (Laughter.) 
They are opposed to negro soldiers ; yet negro soldiers are the 
poor man's substitute, who cannot pay the POO. (Applause.) 



8 

They are opposed to confiscation ; yet confiscation alone can break 
the power of the leaders of Southern politics. (Applause.) They 
are opposed to emancipation ; yet emancipation alone can break 
the oligarchy that has brought on the war. (Great applause, and 
"Three cheers for emancipation.") They are opposed to dis- 
cretionary arrests, which they call arbitrary arrests. They 
opposed them first because the President could not suspend the 
Avrit of habeas roiyus, — which was all true. They oppose them 
now, though Congress has suspended the writ of habeas corpus, 
which nobody denies their right to do. (Cheers and applause.) 
They opposed them not because they were illegal, nor because they 
were arbitrary, but because, though legal, the discretion of the 
President might think rebel sympathizers suspicious characters. 
(Cheers and applause.) 

They are, then, opposed to all the means of conducting the war : 
they are, then, in plain English, opposed to the further conduct of 
the war. That means that they are in favor, whenever and where- 
ever they can get in power, of throwing themselves against the 
Government in the conduct of the war. They attempted in Illi- 
nois to take the military power from the hands of a loyal Governor. 
They have attempted everywhere to elect disloyal Governors, — 
pledged to embarrass the United States in the enforcement of the 
laws. Seymour, knowing that the riot would embarrass the 
government of the United States, stood paralyzed and powerless 
before his "friends." (Laughter.) They discussed the propriety 
of recalling from the army the contingents of the various States. 
The candidate for Governor of Maine, lately so overwhelmingly 
beaten by that patriotic State, (applause) was asked whether, ia 
the event of his election, he would recall from the armies the 
troops of Maine. Instead of repelling with indignation a question 
which was a humiliation to any man except a traitor, he said, 
" When Governor Seymour recalls the troops of New York and 
the Governor of New Jersey recalls the troops of New Jersey, 
then I am ready to recall the troops of Maine." That marked 
him for a traitor ; but he is mistaken in supposing that any regi- 
ment or any company of the troops of Maine would obey his illegal 
and treasonable order. (Great applause.) Doubtless he thought 
they would obey, and that order would have been issued the day 
after his election. The people took care that he should not have 
the opportunity. (Laughter and applause.) Let them get the 
control by any accident, by any thoughtlessness, by any cowardice 
or timidity, by any weariness of the Avar or impatience of taxation, 
in the House of Representatives, and instantly every war measure 
will be clogged in that House ; appropriations will be resisted ; 
conditions will be annexed ; the repeal of the laws that they have 
been assailing will 1)e compelled by refusing supplies to the 



Government; the Government will stand piiralyzeJ in tlio pre- 
sence of its armed enemies. 

If these are their purposes, then how are ■we to treat them and 
how are we to conduct the Government? In my judgment, fellow- 
citizens of the United States, we all have a common interfst in 
this great struggle, and what is the interest of Pennsylvania is the 
interest of Maryland. (Applause.) The line that so long has 
been of ill omen, I take it, was abolished by the day of Gettys- 
burg. (Great applause.) 

The current of events is daily sweeping away the only mark of 
disunion between Pennsylvania and Maryland — their internal 
recognition of slavery, or their refusal to recognize slavery. We 
stand together and ought to stand together as one man in main- 
taining the integrity of the Government, Avhich more entirely 
crushed us than any other portion of the Confederacy if it fall in 
ruin about our ears. How then shall it be maintained ? I say 
first by filling up the depleted ranks of the army of the Potomac. 
(Great applause.) Whether the Government see it or not, from 
the beginning of the war to this day there has been but one 
decisive point upon which one decisive battle could end the war, 
and that has been Virginia. It has never been a question of 
marching to Richmond ; it has been a question of dispersing and 
destroying the army of Gen. Lee, and that has never been difl5- 
cult to find. What the Government has needed is a singleness of 
purpose, bending its unbroken energies to the annihilation of that 
army, and with it would crumble the Southern Republic. (Ap- 
plause.) Victories on other points are victories of detail ; victory 
on that point is decisive, final and overwhelming. Peace will fol- 
low the destruction of that army ; the war will endure until that 
army is destroyed. An armistice will not annihilate it; a media- 
tion will not paralyze it; no election of a Democrat will do any- 
thing except accomplish its purposes, without bloodshed, for it. 
The war drags its length now along because a Presidential elec- 
tion is only a year oiF, and the rebels of the South count on hav- 
ing their friends in ofiice. (''Never, never.") If they have to 
make terms they know the terms will be better with a Democrat 
than with men who are devoted to the integrity, and the power, 
and the perpetuity of the Republic ; and therefore they mean, so 
long as there is a man left in the Southern country, and as much 
as in them lies, that there shall no semblance of peace appear 
until a Democrat mount the Presidential chair. 

The way to peace, therefore, fellow-citizens, is over the 
battle-field, and there is no other path. If a lion lie in that path 
that you are afraid to meet, or one too powerful for you to meet, 
then give up the war. If you are unwilling to make that admis- 
sion, then prosecute it with every energy that you can summon, of 
A 



10 

money and of men; with no hesitation; no stinting; no critical 
spirit ; no inclination to find fault ; mourning errors, not casting 
them in the teeth of those in authority ; countenancing them with 
your earnest support, Avith the firm conviction that because there 
are traitors in the North, every loyal man must double himself in 
strength, energy and devotion. (Applause.) And when they 
menace you with insurrection here, tell them the sooner it begins 
the sooner it Avill be ended. (Great applause.) Let them under- 
stand that it is wholly immaterial to you whether they begin the 
civil war now, or two years hence, Avhen, having under false pre- 
tences crept into power, betrayed the nation, negotiated a hollow 
semblance of peace with the Southern Confederacy, and brought 
discord to every Northern door, the beginning of desolation, the 
introduction of civil w^ar, the impossibility of keeping the residue 
of the States together, will be manifest to all men — the sooner the 
better. That party has always been magnificent in bullying, do 
not be frightened by their violence. (Applause.) 

But how else, gentlemen, shall you end the war ? More than a 
million of men of the white race have volunteered their services in 
defence of American liberty against an oligarchy of slave-holders, 
and until recently their farms have been cultivated in quiet, their 
laborers have been untouched ; they have suffered by the blockade, 
they have suffered by invasion when our armies touched them ; the 
great mass of their agricultural labor has gone on as regularly as 
in the halcyon days when cotton was King. I propose to invade 
this quiet realm of the discrowned King. (Applause.) There 
are four millions of men in those regions on our side. (Applause.) 
"Who opposes the arming of them except the Democratic Conserva- 
tives f They are slaves. The President has proclaimed them 
free. (Applause.) That paper confers no title ; it can only be 
made a title by arms. The negro's arm is ready to execute it. 
Why shall he not be allowed to do it ? (Applause.) " It is 
humiliating to white soldiers to serve in the same ranks with the 



neo-roes 



What say the Army of the Potomac to fifteen or 
twenty thousand to help them in the next great fight ? What 
said General Banks at Port Hudson ? What said General Gill- 
more at Fort Wagner ? (Great applause.) Just what George 
Washington of the Revolution said. (Applause.) Just what 
Andrew Jackson at New Orleans said. (Applause.) Just what 
Perry on Lake Erie saw. (Applause.) Just what Barney, with 
his negro men mingled in with his white men at Bladcnsburg, saw, 
when other men ran away. Men are men in spite of the skin, 
and deeper than the skin. (Applause.) The first martyr of the 
Boston Massacre in 1770, was a negro slave leading the white 
men. (Applause.) One of the heroes of the battle of Bunker 
Hill, living forever in the historic canvass of Trumbull, and living 



11 

more immortally on the page of Bancroft, was a negro. (Ap- 
plause.) No battle-field of the Revolution that was not stained by 
their blood. The men of that day shrank at first, and came to it 
afterwards. They formed no separate regiment ; tliey mingled in 
with the rank and the platoon of their "white fcllow-rountrymen," 
as Andrew Jackson called them. (Applause.) Froni the days of 
the Revolution to the days of the war of 1812, prejudice was silent 
before reason — national necessity and national interest. It was 
only when the cotton aristocracy arose that common sense was 
driven from the minds of men. What do they fear half so much 
as a negro army marching through the cotton field ? 

Gentlemen, without a negro army an attempt at emancipation is 
idle. The President has proclaimed emancipation. A proclama- 
tion is a breath, or printer's ink. It dies of itself, unless there 
be something living behind it. In point of law, no Court will 
hold it a valid title to freedom ; that is my judgment as a lawyer. 
I may be wrong, but it is my judgment. If the negroes of the 
South are to render us any material aid in the suppression of the 
rebellion, they must have a title to freedom that they will under- 
stand to be effectual, and they know that the proclamation is not 
effectual without something following it, — a law of Congress and 
arms. They must further be relieved from the idea, Avhich has 
been most unfortunately countenanced in certain high quarters, 
that after they have fought the battles of liberty, and have aided 
us to win back our territory and consolidate our empire, that after 
an indefinite period of service upon public works in the malaria of 
the South, and on the canals of the North-west, they are to be 
banished from the land in Avhich they were born and which they 
have aided to save. Banish, gentlemen, from your minds that 
humiliating and unworthy idea. (Applause.) Make up your minds 
that if they are to be soldiers, they are to be freemen, with the 
rights of free laborers, protected by the laws, recognized by the 
United States in their position, guaranteed the remedies of the 
Courts of the United States, and armed and drilled to make their 
rights effectual. (Great applause.) And how shall that be done? 
On the theory of our " conservative" fellow-citizens? Thoy say 
that, true the South is in rebellion ; but the State governments 
remain, their governments are in existence ; they have the right, 
the moment they lay down their arms, to be recognized by the 
United States as the only persons entitled to speak in behalf of 
the Southern States; that the men now in authority are the 
governors, the legislators, the judges, the magistrates, the sheriffs 
of the rebel States ; and that what the President should do is 
merely to offer an amnesty to screen individual offenders and open 
his arms to receive those who have just now had the sword pointed 
at our bosoms, not merely as citizens obedient to the law, but as 



12 

tlie representatives and Constitutional governors of the loyal peo- 
ple of the rebel States. That is the Democratic theory of the 
restoration of State government in the rebellious States. Where 
does that lead you ? Su})pose it to be accomplished ; that is what 
they moan by "the Union as it was," Avith the old coalition of the 
Southern Secessionist and the Northern Democrat to govern the 
country and divide the spoils. "The Union as it was " is their 
watch-cry. Do they mean that they will restore Western Virginia 
to Eastern Virginia, bound hand and foot ? Do they mean that 
they will recognize the fugitive Harris as Governor of Tennessee, 
and his scattered legislators as her Legislature ? Do they mean 
that they will recognize the men who assume to represent Ken- 
tucky in the Southern Confederacy, as the proper representatives 
of the people of Kentucky ? Do they mean that they will bring 
back the fugitive Governor of Missouri ? That would be " the 
Union as it was." That would be to recognize as the parties enti- 
tled to govern the rebel States the rebels who now govern them. 
They are the people who, the Democrats say, are now entitled, and 
only entitled, to be listened to. I pray you pause and consider 
gravely this great subject of the restoration of State Governments 
under the Constitution. 

Are the American people ready for such a restoration as that ? 
("No, No.") Is all that the Union has accomplished by a hundred 
thousand of its dead sons, and hundreds of thousands of desolate 
men and women at home mourning them, to recognize an insolent 
pretence, which never for a moment has been a fact ? If that be 
not so, then " the Union as it was," in the sense of the men who 
call for it, is an impossibility. (Applause.) They delude the people 
with vain words when they speak of " the Union as it was." Call 
the dead to life ; clothe his bones with his dissolved flesh ; restore 
the soul to the soulless eyes of the thousands that have fallen mar- 
tyrs upon the battle-field, and then you can restore the Union as 
it Avas. (Great applause.) The attempt is to begin a new civil 
war. When you order back West Virginia, she will turn to you 
the points of her bayonets that are now on your side — and justly. 
When you recognize the butchers of East Tennessee for its Repub- 
lican government, the very ghosts of the murdered dead will lead 
the living men to battle against you. (Great applause.) When 
you talk of recognizing Kentucky and Missouri as States of the 
rebellion, j^ou will be overwhelmed by ridicule that no man can 
stand up against. And that is "the Union as it was," in the words 
of the Democratic orators. Why will they perpetually come before 
the people with a lie in their mouth and delusion in their right 
hand ? 

" The Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was !" I am for 
the Constitution as it is, and that has altered the Union from what 



13 

it Avas, and it -svill stay altered until eternit3\ (Great appliuse.) 
If the "conservative" gentlemen attain to power, it will stay 
altered in fragments of shame to us and our posterity. If those 
Avho are now in power, and their successors, continue to retain the 
management of the Government on its present principles, it will 
continue as it is, excepting so far as it is bettered, according to 
the Constitution as it is. (Applause.) And when I speak of the 
Constitution as it is, I mean as it came from the hands of George 
Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, not 
the wretched, crippled hump-back that has been presented before 
our eyes, the result of a cross between the Northern and tlie South- 
ern Democrat, an ill-begotten and shapeless monster that they have 
contrived for their purposes. Born without arms to use or legs to 
move with, and with a head that could only contrive mischief, and 
for everything else was impotent; but that Constitution, in the full 
vigor of its humanity, as it came from the hands of George Wash- 
ington, adequate for every contingency of National life, speaking 
so plainly that 'those that run may read, and only the perversely 
blind can misinterpret. (Great applause.) Aye, the Constitution 
as it is, which says that Congress may call forth the militia and 
use the armies of the United States to suppress insurrection, and 
therefore the war is constitutional according to the letter of the 
Constitution as it is. That Constitution says that Congress shall^ 
guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of 
government ; and it is under the Constitution as it is that the 
armies now march to remove oppression and restore republican 
liberty. (Great applause.) And it is the Constitution as it is 
Avhich declares that Congress shall have a right to pass all laws 
necessary and proper to carry into execution all the powers vested 
in it or any other department of the Government; and, therefore, 
whatever Congress may think in its judgment is necessary to restore 
and guarantee republican forms of government in the rebel States, 
that law, according to the Constitution as it is, Congress may pass. 
(Great applause.) I am for exerting the power. I do not believe, 
my friends, that there is any abitrary power vested anywhere in 
the Government of the United States. I tliink the Constitution a 
provision made for the great necessities of National life by men 
who had just come out of a war of seven years, and anarchy of 
twelve years — wise men who knew the necessities of public life, 
and Avere not careful to bind the arms of the Nation when its being 
is at stake ; and they provided that in the event of invasion or 
rebellion, or public danger, the writ of habeas corpus might be sus- 
pended. That meant, not that the President should be vested with 
an arbitrary and reckless power to arrest any man at his will and 
pleasure, irresponsible to the people and answerable only to him- 
self, but that the exigencies of national life, in the conduct of war, 



14 

reiulcrcd it impossible to rest on the mere judicial process for 
enforcing tlie liiAvs. It is impossible to let the public safety depend 
U])on the possibility of proving by legal evidence a participation 
■with public enemies ; and, therefore, as the lesser of two evils, 
as anarchy stood upon the one side, and discretionary power, under 
tlio guardianship of the people, temporarily vested in their chosen 
officer by them, was the only danger to be encountered upon the 
other, as they trust the President to determine who are in rebel- 
lion, and with the command of the armies, for its suppression, 
upon the field of battle, and to sacrifice the lives of thousands, 
because they are dressed in gray uniform, and not as we are, in 
blue, so they give him the discretionary power, if in his judgment 
any one. Democrat or Republican, is dangerous to the public peace 
from any reason ; he may not punish him, not try him by Court 
Martial, not incarcerate him in the penitentiary, but he may 
arrest him to prevent mischief, and hold him till the danger is 
past. (Great applause.) That is the Constitution as it is, and 
not as the Democrats construe it; and I am in favor of apply- 
ing its powers to the letter and in the spirit, and to the bitter end 
of the war. 

I warned the Government a year before they got an act of Con- 
gress, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, that undertaking to do 
it without that authority would raise a storm that they could not 
meet. Gentlemen, no man deplores more than I do the accuracy 
of my reading of the tenderness of the American people for the 
forms of law. It has cost us, and we are this day suffering from 
it, the State of New York, the State of Pennsylvania last year, the 
State of Ohio, the State of Indiana, and the State of Illinois. 
Kow the power is upon the just basis of law. Rational men will 
yield obedience to it. None but traitorous conservatives will con- 
tinue to howl against it. (Great applause.) Every loyal man 
knows the President will not use it for oppression. 

I turn to consider that other great power and duty — the guar- 
antee of Republican Governments to the States. That touches a 
question which ought to have been decided by the last Congress, 
which our friends are singularly timid about meeting. In my 
judgment, the sooner it is met the better, and the sooner the 
grounds upon which we act are ascertained, the better for all par- 
ties. I regret that, in dealing with the question of reorganizing 
the State Governments, eminent gentlemen have used words which 
they, I think, Avill regret hereafter. They speak of the Southern 
men in arms as being alien enemies. The President has never so 
called them. Congress has never so called them. No laAV upon 
the statute book so treats them. No official document has ever 
hinted at that character. To call them alien enemies, admits that 
their Secession M'as effectual to give them the right of independ- 



15 

ence in the eye of the world. It admits tliey arc not traitors hut 
enemies. I saj they are traitors and not cneniies, (applause ;) 
citizens under the law, against which they are illegally waging 
war, not foreigners waging a war upon even terms with men who 
are foreigners to them. They war with the rope around their 
necks. (Applause.) Their victory can be decorated by no laurel 
in history. Where she speaks of their deeds of valor, it Avill 
always be with a melancholy tear over the cause in which it was 
exhibited. It will always be accompanied with the bar sinister, to 
mark that the cause was illegitimate, the purpose iniquitous, the 
object unjust. You sanctify them when you call them alien ene- 
mies. Keep them to their real character — traitorous enemies of 
their country. (Applause.) And when the right of conquest is 
referred to, as it has been by a very distinguished and a very able 
gentleman to find out the methods of dealing with the reorganiza- 
tion of the State Governments, I desire to say, that any man or 
any party that claims over the Southern States, after the insur- 
rection has been repressed — that is the legal language, gentlemen, 
of the statutes of the United States — any party that after the 
insurrection shall have been repressed, shall attempt to consider 
them a conquered people, that party will destroy itself, or if it be 
successful, it will destroy Republican liberty. It is a doctrine 
unknown to the Constitution of the United States ; it is beyond 
the purview of American principles of Government ; it recognizes 
what no responsible statesman has heretofore recognized or ought 
ever to recognize, the possession of absolute, arbitrary, despotic 
power in the Government over a portion of the States as the result 
of its military operations to suppress an insurrection. It places 
the Government above the law to enforce the Vdw ! The law speaks 
differently ; the Constitution speaks differently. Under them both 
we have to act. We owe it to the wisdom of our forefathers to 
recognize that they have left our hands as free to deal with rebel- 
lion as wisdom will sanction — and every power in our hands which 
tends to accomplish the object. We must deal with it in their 
mode. The States are, by rebellion, extinguished and become Ter- 
ritories ! says a very distinguished and eloquent statesman. Then 
how can it be that the Constitution requires Congress to guaran- 
tee to every State a republican form of Government, if the 
destruction of a republican form of Government in the State con- 
verts it into the condition of a Territory, and subjects it to the arbi- 
trary power of Congress. They did not so deem it. They regarded 
the States as continuing, perpetual elements of our Union, and 
their citizens always beneath the Constitution. But they draw 
the broad and marked discrimination between the individual rights 
of the citizen, the existence of the State as a body politic, and^ its 
capacity by reason of its want of organization to exert its political 



16 

powers. If a man in South Carolina comes to Philadelpliia no 
la-wj^T can plead " alien enemy" to his suit. If I go to South 
Carolina, I have all the rights of a citizen of South Carolina. The 
officers of the United States, their Postmasters, their Collectors, 
their Marshals, are still provided for by law, and some exist ; the 
statutes are still upon the statute books ; it is still illegal to im- 
port anything within those limits without paying the duties ; the 
Courts exist wherever the President names Judges. They are in 
every particular still under the laws of the United States, described 
in their statute books, no where except as States of this Union. 
When men are to be tried for treason, they can only be tried in 
the Courts of the United States, according to the laws of the 
United States, by juries summoned according to the laws of the 
United States, under the Constitution of the United States. But 
these clauses do not fetter the hands of the Government, as stupid 
conservatives say, when they quote the Constitution to prohibit 
the marching of an army to remove opposition to the execution of 
the laws. When the opposition is dispersed, then the reign of the 
courts is restored and the day of punishment may come. But 
with reference to their political franchises, the wisdom of our fore- 
fathers has placed them a step further oft'. Our " conservative 
friends are altogether too eager to have their votes for the next 
Presidential contest when they propose to regard the existing 
authorities in tlie rebel States as entitled to be recognized as the 
authorities of the States within the Union. That, doubtless, 
would be very convenient if they could get the votes of half a 
dozen of the Southern States, and make up their deficiency of 
votes in the North in that way, and thereby elect their " con- 
servative " President. Fortunately, the law is not so unwise. 
There can be no electors of President from any State, unless there 
be a government organized in it recognized by the Government of 
the United States, whose officers have sworn obedience to the con- 
stitution of the United States. (Applause.) Till that, there can 
be no authority any wdiere exerted. Do those men now in autho- 
rity in the Southern States constitute the State governments under 
the Constitution that they repudiate, that the}^ say is annulled, 
that they have taken up arms to destroy ? On the contrary, 
the very first act in secession was not to carry their territory from 
beneath the laws of the United States, but to tear down their own 
State governments and institute others. Those that they tore 
down were republican governments in the sense of the Consti- 
tution. Those that they have established are a mob in the form 
of the Government, and the rebellion organized to execute its 
pui-j)0.se, entitled to recognition by nobody. To participate in 
their government is, by the laws of the United States, the crime 
of high treason. Their Governor, by merely accepting his posi- 



17 

tion, renders liimsolf liable to trial, conviction, and hnngin;<;. 
Every officer of theirs is aiding to promote the war. They arc 
a band of traitors, usurping rights over citizens of the United 
States. The armies of the United States move to strike that 
power from their hands, and restore it to loyal men ; ami in 
doing that, the only arbiter of what government shall be recog- 
nized, the only arbiter of who shall be treated as a governor, or a 
legislator, or a judge of a rebel State, is the United States in Con- 
gress assembled. (Applause.) Till they shall recognize another 
government, there is no government. In the absence of a State 
government, there must be either anarchy, or a legislative and 
executive power somewhere. Those that have abdicated can no 
longer be the government of the State. The right and the duty 
to guarantee a republican government is vested in Congress. Con- 
gress is therefore charged to take every measure that is necessary 
to restore Republican government. Pending the interregnum, 
Congress is the only legislative power for the State, the President 
is the only executive power for the State. They can, under a pro- 
vision which I have already quoted, pass any law in their judg- 
ment necessary to consolidate the Republican government which 
they are about to establish, and they have the sole and absolute 
discretion of determining who shall and who shall not be recog- 
nized as the government of the State. Nay, gentlemen, so far is 
this from being mere theory or a fanciful disquisition, it is now 
the policy on which the administration has acted. John Letcher 
was playing Governor at Richmond when the President of the 
United States recognized Pierpoint as the Governor of Western 
Virginia, and the Senate of the United States and the House 
of Representatives admitted their representatives to the floors 
of Congress. When men speak of any other mode of adjustment, 
they fly in the face of the actual conduct of the Government. 
It is not my theory ; it is the policy of the Administration. 
They have already solved the problem ; they have already pointed 
out their course of action ; they have already declared their in- 
terpretation of the Constitution to be that which I have put upon 
it, that they are acting as the guarantors of Repulican government 
in States where Republican Government has ceased to exist, and 
that they alone are at liberty to re-establish it, that they alone 
are entitled to determine who are the legitimate possessors of 
power, and that they have done in the case of Western Vir- 
ginia. Had John Letcher been the Governor of Virginia, and 
merely an erring mortal, going a little too far in the tracks 
of treason, as our "conservative" opponents would lead you to 
suppose, then there could be no recognition of any other State 
Government anywhere within the borders of Virginia. The Pre- 
sident and Congress did not so treat him. They treated him 



18 

as the head of the Richmond mob ; they treated hun as the leader 
of the Virginia rebels ; they treated him as a traitor who had 
pulled down his own State Government, and then undertook to 
usurp illegal authority over his fellow-citizens. It is in that light 
and that alone that he stands before the Government of the United 
States. 

Now, gentlemen, let us see how this will w^ork out, and whether 
this is not the safer law and the only one possible path for us who 
mean to accomplish something practical, permanent, and blessed 
by the suppression of the rebellion to pursue. The President has 
proclaimed the abolition of slavery. (Applause.) If it rests on 
that proclamation, let us trace it out a little. Suppose the war to 
be ended and our " conservative " friends to be in power, and 
Mr. John Letcher to be recognized as the Governor of Virginia, 
and Mr. Bonham as the Governor of South Carolina, and so on 
through the rebellious States ; the existing legislatures remain ; 
the existing distribution of political power remains ; the existing 
Southern courts remain ; the existing organization of the Southern 
militia remains ; the existing debts, the war debts, that they have 
incurred to fight us, remain. They will be at liberty to assume, 
as most of them I believe have already done, the Confederate debt 
of the rebel States. That, therefore, becomes a permanent burthen 
upon the people of the United States in common with our State 
debts and with our national debt. Those men thus reinstated in 
power by our act are the only persons that can have a word to say 
on the subject of whether the proclamation is or is not valid as law. 
What do you suppose the judges of South Carolina would say on 
that point if a negro were to claim his freedom under it ? It makes 
it at once a dead letter. It is altogether frivolous ; I say further, 
gentlemen, it is something very much like a cowardly evasion, when 
men who wish to avoid that inevitable consequence of that form of 
reconstructing the Governments in the rebel States say, " if the 
proclamation is valid it will be held valid by the courts, and if it 
is void it cannot be made valid." Neither proposition is of the 
courts of the rebel States in the hands of the true. If it Avere as 
valid as any law upon the statue book of the United States, if it 
remain a mere proclamation and be left to the tender mercies of rebel 
judges, it will be annulled and disregarded, for they are the only 
judges of what is the laAV of their own State, and therefore when 
you shall have turned the negro free, if he should attempt to assert 
his freedom, their process will hang him ; their process will shoot 
him ; their process will hunt him down by the blood-hound ; their 
process will drag him backwards into slavery. If he attempt to 
rebel and show himself too strong, they will call on tlie Govern- 
ment of the United States to send the army of the Potomac to 
reduce him to slavery under the laws of the States; and a "con- 



19 

servative President would only Lc too li;i])py to have the o])iJor- 
tunity of manifesting in that manner that he was opposed to 
^ negro equality.' " 

Neither is the other hypothesis true that if it be invalid it can- 
not be helped. As it now stands, in my judgment the Supremo 
Court of the United States will not recognize it as law; the United 
States Courts cannot enforce it. But it can be helped by an act of 
Congress under its power to legislate for the States pending the 
execution of the guarantee ; it can be helped by an act of Congress 
in the execution of its guarantee of Republican Government if it 
considers that the continuance of these men in slavery, and the 
power of the masters over them, is incompatible with a permanent 
consolidation of Republican institutions in the States. (Applause.) 
That is a political, and not a judicial question. That will be decided 
by the Congress of the United States and the President of the 
United States ; and the Courts of the United States will follow the 
judgment of Congress and the President. Make it an act of Con- 
gress, and then you have made it a law. Place on the statute-book 
judicial process, and then you have given the freedmen the Courts 
of the United States to protect them against the local tyranny. 
IMuke it a law of the United States, and then the armies of the 
United States stand, not to return them to their masters, but to 
repel their masters from them under the law. (Applause.) 

Let the conservative bowl; this is the Constitution as it is: this 
is the execution of the guarantee that George Washington placed 
in the Constitution ; this is the condition to which the States by 
rebellion have brought themselves within the legitimate, express 
legislative power of Congress, to deal with them and their property, 
and the organization of their society, on such principles as Congress 
shall judge to be not incompatible with the permanence of Republi- 
can (jovernraent. It is frivolous to say that we can arm a million 
of men to prostrate half a million in the dust, taking away precious 
life, to restore Republican Government, but we cannot restore free- 
dom to slaves in the same cause. Life is protected against illegal 
aggression in the Constitution as well as property, even of the most 
unquestionable character. Life is not less sacred than slavery. Can 
we destroy life to repel from power those Avho have usurped a power 
to create unrepublican forms of government in the rebel States ? 
and are we to be told, if Congress shall be of the opinion that the con- 
tinuance of these men in slavery is an insuperable barrier to the 
restoration of Republican Government, if they shall be of opinion 
that the resources of the Government are not enough to put down 
the rebellion without their aid, if they are convinced that they can- 
not get their aid without promising and securing to them freedom, 
and that they can iiever be free unless their wives and their 
children, their old and their young, are free with them — are we to 



20 

be told tliat the power of Congress is limited with reference to that 
species of property — that it must stand a perpetual obstacle to free 
government ? Why, fellow-citizens, it is to construe the Constitu- 
tion in the interest of the rebellious faction that by coalition with 
Northern Democrats has governed the country to its ruin for thirty 
years, to adopt it. (Applause.) They have always been the strict 
constructionists. George Washington was the rational construc- 
tionist. They have been always in favor of tying the Government of 
the United States hand and foot, because they saw that it had strong 
feet to trample down rebellion, and long arms to reach it. (Ap- 
plause.) Their rebellion has, I think, removed the cobwebs from 
before the peoples' eyes. They now begin to see the policy that 
lay at the bottom of the strict construction of the Democratic school. 
They begin to understand that they were barriers thrown up to pro- 
tect the institution of slavery. They begin to understand that they 
were the deliberately prepared bulwarks for a premeditated rebel- 
lion. They now begin to see that James Buchanan was only 
repeating the lesson he had heard from Jefferson Davis, when he 
said there was no powder to invade a State, no power to make war 
against a State, no power to coerce a State ; the States must be left 
to their good pleasure, to do ill if they so pleased. That was not the 
Constitution that George Washington framed, nor the one that the 
early men of the Republic acted upon, nor is it the one that we now, 
in the presence of a great National necessity, will act upon. We will 
restore it to its power and act upon that. Oh, but they say, if you 
refuse to recognize the existing State Governments, they will refuse 
to lay down their arms. Nobody but a fool expects them to lay down 
their arms till they are knocked from their hands. (Great applause.) 
They are out of Eastern Tennessee now. How did they get out ? 
They are out of Western Virginia. How came they out ? They 
are out of one-third of the residue of Virginia. How came thej 
out? If the reinforcements pour on rapidly enough, they will soon 
be out of Georgia and Alabama as well as Mississippi. (Applause.) 
Where would a "conservative" President go to find the Governor 
of Mississippi or Louisiana, now ? Wlien we are done with the 
rebellion, there will be no governments, even in form, to recognize, 
if the President do his duty. (Applause.) The traitors will be 
hunted from their hiding-places. If the President executes his duty 
the first men to be sought out and arrested are those who have held 
civil office in the rebellious States. He will seize on the governor 
first, and the constable last, in the order of their precedence, and, 
when he shall send them to jail, he will tell them not to stand upon 
the order of their going, but to go at once, and go quickly, (laugh- 
ter and applause,) and then the Conservatives will be in great 
trouble, for there will be no Government, rebel or loyal. What are 
\Ye to do then ? The execution of the military powers of the Presi- 



21 

dent brings the States back to Avliere I say they arc by law — peo- 
ple forming a State without a political organization, called State 
Government. That they can only receive nn<lcr the auspices of 
Congress and in accordance with the forms and by the laws that it 
and it alone sliall see fit to prescribe. (Applause.) When proper 
provision shall have been made for these things, then there will be 
something else necessary; for to all liberties a guarantee is neces- 
sary. Our great forefathers had none of our foolish, sentimental 
belief in the impeccability of the people — not a bit of it. They 
thought that, as a general thing, and in the long run, the great 
mass and body of the people were wise and liberal, and honest, and 
would conduct their aiiairs well ; but they knew that bad men could 
get into power ; that great masses of men could be inflamed by pas- 
sion ; that injustice might be perpetrated by mobs as well as by a 
tyrant ; that a Republican Government could be overthrown ami a 
despotic Government erected ; that a minority, with superior arms 
or superior intelligence, could trample down a majority disarmed 
and out of possession of the government. They foresaw, as the 
pages of the Federalist will prove to any man who has read it, 
when they framed the Constitution, exactly what we now see with 
our eyes in these days of blood and carnage, that a great interest 
acting together as a unit, covering a great region of country, 
antagonistic to the other interests of the country, might com- 
bine, and by foreign aid, and the possession of the local govern- 
ments, create a great rebellion, overthrow the Republican Govern- 
ment, and establish something that was not Republican; and there- 
fore they created the power to suppress insurrection, and imposed 
the duty on Congress to guarantee Republican Governments. We, 
unlike those who have to deal with most great rebellions, without 
hurting any one great permanent legitimate interest of society, can 
strike from under the faction its only foundation. Heretofore, civil 
strifes have arisen between the poor and the rich ; those who have, 
and those who have not, property; between those who are in power 
and those who are out of power, to acquire what they have not. 
Those are revolutions difficult to be dealt with. It is difficult to 
get at the cause and to remove it. You cannot destro}" property. 
It is difficult to change the form of a political organization. Here 
the foundation is a social institution — the right by law, contrary to 
the law of nature, for one man to hold another in servitude. You 
cut up the roots of the rebellion by striking the shackles from the 
slave. (Prolonged applause.) How shall it be done 't Congress 
passed two laws, in 18G2, authorizing the President to use as many 
persons of African descent as he might see fit, to aid him, organized 
in such manner as he might think best, to suppress the rebellion. 
The President now, late in the day— in my judgment much later 



22 

than it ought to have been — has commenced in earnest the organi- 
zation of the negro. regiments from the slave element of the country. 
The "conservatives," North and South, cry aloud against it. No 
man who does not mean to aid the. rebellion will lay a straw across 
the track of that march. (Applause.) We are informed " slaves 
cannot be soldiers !" There is mighty little of the slave left in the 
man who has a musket upon his shoulder. (Laughter and applause.) 
"Slaves cannot be soldiers." They who have taken leave of 
absence are likely to keep it. "Slaves cannot be soldiers." Then 
make them free by law of Congress, and let us stop the argument. 
(Applause.) " You cannot take private property for public use 
without compensation." No; but every man in the United States 
owes military service to the United States paramount to all laws 
of the States ; and if the negro owes the service the master has no 
right to claim pay for it. (Applause.) The burden passes with 
the property. The master has been voting upon the negro's per- 
sonality for eighty years. We will let the negro fight a little now 
upon his personality. (Laughter and applause.) But it is said, 
white soldiers will not fight in the same ranks with the negroes. 
Where have the soldiers said they did not want their aid ? Where 
have they turned their backs upon an enemy because a negro stood 
facing the same enemy ? What officers have throAvn up their com- 
missions because they are humbled by being in the same ranks? 
Are they rather not rational enough to say that the musket upon 
the shoulder of the negro elevates him to the dignity of man ? 
The Federalist, in its wisdom, foresaw this day in something of its 
brightness when it said that commotions might make a race of un- 
happy beings emerge to the level of manhood. (Applause.) But 
we are told, " you will disorganize your armies." Was Rosecrans' 
army disorganized four days ago because negroes had been intro- 
duced into the army? " The Union men of the loyal slave States 
will be disgusted and they will rebel." Where? Western A^irginia 
has abolished slavery since this system has been initiated and pro- 
claimed. (Applause.) Missouri has passed her act of emancipa- 
tion, made gradual by her Copperheads, because her loyal men 
would otherwise have made it peremptory and immediate. In 
Maryland, that surrounds your Capital, and more than once has felt 
the tramp of the invader — such is the unanimous sentiment of her 
people, that her Governor has been compelled to hasten up his lag- 
ging opinions and proclaim himself in favor of Emancipation — 
and a convention next year to effect it ; and the only question is 
whether the enlistment of the slaves wnll leave any to emancipate. 
(Laughter and applause.) Who has rebelled ? Who that was 
loyal to the Government has become disloyal ? Somewhere, where 
the negro fever has been lurking under the skin, of course it has 



23 

broken out ; but tbc fever was tliere l)efore ; It only required a liot 
day to bring it out. (Laughter.) No sound loyal man lias a 
symptom of that in him. 

"But there will be servile insurrections, outrages u])on women, 
massacres of masters, burning down of houses, destruction of gri'at 
regions of country," everything that the Apocalypse describes 
before the last day. That mass of freedmen has done no such 
iniquity anywhere. They have submitted with more than angelic 
patience to the torments of their masters, till the United States 
has given them an opportunity of freedom ; and then, murdering 
no one, outraging no one, insulting no one, they have marched 
quietly through the streets of Baltimore to the negro camp and 
undertaken the obligations of the military oath. (Applause.) 
The guarantee that you want is, enough of them — that is all. 
Organize one hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand, or three 
hundred thousand, and plant them as a beacon light and a tower 
of strength in the middle of the Southern country ; and that with 
an act of Congress makes freedoms not only law but fact ; and 
till that is done the President's proclamation is not worth the 
paper on which it is written; ("That's so," and cheers.) Your 
declaration that you are going to set the slaves free is a mere 
delusion ; their rushing to join the army is merely preparing their 
necks for the halter ; the recognition of the existing rebel authori- 
ties is merely handing them over to the stake and the torture. 
Humanity, Christianity, the highest principles, the most ordinary 
honor, combine in crying shame on thus complicating the fate of 
that innocent people with yours, if you do not mean to make their 
fate also yours. (Applause.) Let them stay at home, doomed to 
the inexorable lash and eternal labor, rather than drag them out 
to incur the deadly hate and hostility of their masters, and then 
return them defenceless to their tender mercies. Thei-e may be 
execrable humiliations yet connected with the adjustment of this 
great revolution, but the pen of the historian will steep itself in 
gall of equal bitterness for no other act as for calling negroes into 
the field, and abandoning them afterwards to slavery. That, fel- 
low-citizens, is one of those steps which, once taken, can never be 
recalled. "The Union as it was" can never be after that step. 
But when the negroes shall be organized, armed, disciplined, deco- 
rated with the uniform of the United States, and taught the 
manoeuvres of the field, an act of Congress which proclaims them 
and their like free, will be an act that will be respected. Then 
the L^nited States will have acquired four millions of people in the 
rebel States whose liberty depends upon tlie perpetuity of the 
Union ; and for the first time you will have a guarantee, such as 
you never had before. You will have converted the element of 
your weakness into the clement of your strength. You will have 



24 

■wrested the sword from your antagonist, and will wield it over his 
defenceless head. Your friends are camped eternally among tliem, 
and they are on their good behavior. If they attempt to reduce 
them to slavery, the law calls the men of the North to vindicate 
the right they have conferred, not to meet in arms the men they 
had previously armed against the Southern rebellion. That is the 
legal way that that problem will be accomplished. Then if we 
hear the wretched cry, coming from the lowest of the populace, 
chiefly that which floods us from abroad, about negro equality and 
the intrusion of negro labor upon white labor, mention to tliem one 
or two things which may even meet their intellect. In the first 
place, if anybody is afraid of negro equality, he is not far from it 
already (Laughter ;) in the next place, if God has made him equal 
and only accidental circumstances have made him unequal, you 
cannot help it ; and if He has made him unequal by the laws of 
nature, and independently of accidental circumstances, then no 
amount of demagogueism, no amount of abolition enthusiasm can 
make one hair black or white, or add an inch to his stature, intel- 
lectual or moral. When you talk about expeUing him from the 
country, you talk simple craziness. Expel four millions of people ! 
Where are the ships ? Where is the land that will receive them ? 
Where are the people that will pay the taxes to remove them ? 
Who will cultivate the deserted regions that they leave ? Who 
will indemnify King Cotton for the loss of his subjects ? (Laughter 
and applause.) AVhat will the Cotton planter do — represented to 
you as a gentleman who like Apolyon in the Pilgrim's Progress, 
eats and spouts nothing but fire ; but you will find a little common 
sense at the bottom of it all. Let him understand that the negro 
is free, and that he has to deal with him as a free laborer, or let 
cotton go uncultivated, and he will hasten to pay him wages, and 
the negro will be glad to receive them. (Applause.) But he will 
run up North, say this same class of people, and compete with us 
for our labor. Who ever heard of a free negro running away from 
where he was free ? Who ever heard of a negro running at all, 
if he could help it ? (Laughter.) They don't run from Maryland 
to Pennsylvania — why from South Carolina to Louisiana ? " But 
they are lazy and idle." Those who want to keep them as slaves 
say so ; nobody else. We in Maryland have more experience on 
that sultject than anybody else. We have about 200,000 negroes; 
one-half of them are free ; the other half are slave. We find that 
the slaves are lazier than the free negroes. We find that the free 
negroes have schools, educate their cliildren, lay up money in the 
Savings Banks, and do not crowd the court of my friend Judge 
Bond as much as the class of white people from across the water. 
Everybody talks against them, who wants to keep tliem down below 
the level of the slave. It is the interest of the people who own 



25 

the slave property with which they come in competition, to do it : 
but wlicn there was an attempt made a fe^Y jvuvh ago to expel 
them fronfi Maryhmd, the leadini^ bind holders and ne;2;ro holders 
protested against it, and stopped it because it would destroy the 
agricultural industry of the State. If we in ]\Iaryland did not 
want to lose one-half our agricultural population, how will they of 
South Carolina live if they lose it all ? (Applause.) Gentlemen, 
necessity is a teacher that we in this country have yet to leain 
to respect. We have been in the habit of doing what seemed 
to us good in our own eyes ; frequently it was very bad. We have 
to learn, and our Southern brethren have to learn more bitterly 
than we, that sometimes people have to do what they can do, and 
not what they prefer to do. When the Southern master is taught 
that the question is not whether he will have the negro free or 
slave, but whether he will have him free or no cotton, he will take 
the negro free. (Applause.) No rebel State will vote to emanci- 
pate their slaves. Do not be under any such delusion for an 
instant. They mean to hold them as long as they can. No rebel 
State will vote to come back to the Union — rest assured of it — as 
long as there is an army in the field ; but state the question, do 
you prefer, now belonging to the United States, to govern your- 
selves or be governed by Congress; and they will hasten to re-or- 
ganize a proper State government. So with reference to the 
negro : if you ask them whether they would rather have the negro 
free or slave, they will say unanimously " slave ;"' but if you say, 
" the negro shall be free, will you pay him wages as a workman, 
or will you not liave cultivators for your fields," they will say, 
"we will pay him wages ;" and that is no speculation cither, gen- 
tlemen. At this moment large plantations in Louisiana are culti- 
vated under bargains made betAveen the master and tlie slave for a 
reasonable compensation. To such an extent has the depletion of 
the slave population of the western shore of Maryland gone, that 
some of the most violent secessionists have gone to their slaves and 
offered them higher wages than heretofore they would have had 
to pay white men, if they Avould stay at home and not enlist. 
(Applause.) 

Gentlemen, the world moves palpably to the eye in this latter 
day ; and the man who supposes he can stand still in the midst of 
the great moral m.ovement of this world might as well plant his 
feet firmly in the mud and say, " the world may circle around the 
sun but I will not go with it." You are parts of the current and 
are borne on with it against your will. Day after day you accept 
what yesterday you would have scouted and the day before would 
have thought craziness. Men's interests are somotimes blinded by 
their passions, but when Vheir passions are chastised their interest 
resumes the supremacy. Crush the rebellion, and cotton will be 



26 

again cultivated. Crush the rebellion, and the question of labor 
will revive. Crush the rebellion, and the interests of the planter 
will be a matter for his consideration. Crush the rebellion, and he 
will make the best terms he can with his emancipated and armed 
fellow-countrymen of the African race. (Applause.) And, on the 
other hand, if this wretched, cross-eyed, and double-faced conserva- 
tism (laughter) shall get into power ; if the men who delude the 
people and lie to their own consciences where they are not dis- 
honest, shall crown themselves again, as for thirty years they have 
hitherto crowned themselves for evil, with the powers of the 
Government of the United States, and shall proceed to act on their 
view of the Constitution, and recognize the rebel leaders as the 
masters of their loyal fellow-citizens, whom now for two long years 
they have illegally oppressed, restore them to the seats of power, 
admit into the Congress of the United States their representatives, 
leave the conduct of the local elections under their dictation and 
allow their armies to stand guard over the ballot box, and their 
laws to regulate who shall elect and who shall be elected, and their 
Constitution to determine how the balance of power shall be dis- 
tributed between the white regions of the State and the slave 
regions of the State — then, I say, although the Union may be 
restored in that way, it will be at the loss of all the fruits of the 
war ; there will be no permanent peace ; it will be a treacherous 
and shifting sand on which no permanent structure can be laid, 
over which no great march for improvement can pursue its unob- 
structed way. We merely restore to power those that have rebel-' 
led, to subjugate the North by the old coalition to abide their time 
till undying hate still fostered and kept alive by the perpetuation 
of political power, shall awake amid some great National collision 
from abroad ; to leave our ranks in the day of battle, to lift the 
banner of rebellion in the midst of national disaster, with combined 
armies tear in pieces the Republic that they are now vainly strug- 
gling to overthrow. I say that now when our armies have advanced 
to the very heart of the Confederacy, let us press it home and rest 
nowhere. (Great applause.) Our armies now gird all the rebel- 
lion ; the leaders of the rebellion begin to feel the inward tortures 
of conscious guilt, and they begin to feel the searching throes of 
the fire that we are heaping around them. Press forward only a 
little more and they will be consumed in the conilagration that 
they themselves have created. (Applause.) We have now pos- 
session of the Mississippi ; we have possession of all west of it sub- 
stantially ; we have all of Mississippi in our possession ; we have 
nearly all Louisiana in our possession ; we have all of Tennessee in 
our possession ; we have one-half of the State of Virginia in our 
possession ; we have one full half of all the population that rebelled, 
in our possession ; we have crippled their resources, in great mea- 



27 

sure disorganized or paralyzed their armies ; we liavo still fi;^litinj4 
to do, but we have less of it to do than we had a year ago ; and 
now with one combined and energetic effort, if with our feet we can 
stamp down the "conservative" revolutionary rc-action at home 
and launch as a bolt of fire upon the enemy our unbroken ranks, a 
year more and possibly wo shall begin to see the end of the war. 
(Applause.) But, gentlemen, rest assured that they who are ready 
to make peace first, will not dictate the terms of it ; rest assured 
that they who are determined to see no end of the war, excepting 
under the crown of victory, will wear that crown. (Applause.) It 
is tenacity, it is endurance, it is patience, it is the resolution never 
to stop fighting until your enemy yields, that constitute the great 
qualities of nations born to rule. We now are on trial before the 
nations of the world. If the sword drop from our wearied hands, 
they will say : " Go, ye nation of shop-keepers and weavers ; work, 
navigate, be ingenious, build houses, weave fabrics; make arms for 
the rest of the world, leave other men to bear and wield them : 
You are not the legitimate descendents of the men who wrested 
their independence from the power of Great Britain." Maintain 
your power intact, scout down and stamp down any man who speaks 
of any terms of peace at all. (Great applause.) Tell him that 
this is no foreign war to be terminated by a treaty ; it is a domes- 
tic rebellion to be stamped in the earth, and the only treaty is the 
Constitution of the United States as it is and as we construe it ; 
(great applause) the only privileges of the rebels are the laws of 
Congress as we have passed them and will execute them over them 
till they submit ; their only right is to a legal trial and mercy 
afterwards, if the President sees fit. (Applause.) They are not 
alien enemies, they are traitors whose lives are forfeited. When 
we deal with them, gentlemen, on these terms, they will under- 
stand that they have begun a work which the;v know now is not 
easy, they will then know is impossible ; they will find that they 
set out to avert death in old age and they encountered suicide at 
the threshold ; they will begin to understand what might there 
slumbers in the heart of the American people, wielded by wisdom, 
backed by energy and resolution and by that instinct which is never 
wanting to any people destined to greatness — the instinct of power 
that leads them never to yield as long as a man or a dollar remain, 
as long as there is an acre to be defended or an inch to be restored 
to their domination. Never allow the God Terminus to recede 
across the boundary of any State — let that be the watchword of 
the American Republic. Then it will be as great, as glorious, as 
beneficent, as long-lived, yea more long-lived than the immortal 
example of Republican government, the Rome of the ancient world. 
On these terms we shall stand respected before the nations of the 
world. 



28 

Every despot in Europe curled liis lips when the rebellion broke 
out, at the feeble, -wretched, vacilating, dilapidated government 
that undertook to restore its authority over this immense and mag- 
nificent region. When the men of the North and of the loyal 
slave States commenced to develope their power, they paused in 
their determination to recognize, they paused in their more thani 
half-formed resolution to intervene and throw the weight of their 
arms on the other side. When our arms were at a low ebb a year 
and a-half ago, Louis Napoleon thought it a convenient oppor- 
tunity to march in and take possession of Mexico ; to limit our 
expansion. lie would not do it to-day ; and, by the blessing of 
God, when this rebellion shall be suppressed, I take it there is a 
long account to settle with two great nations of the European 
world. (Long-continued applause.) I never said a word, my 
friends, to anybody in this house on that subject before, but I knew 
what I thought, and I guessed what every American thought. 
(Great applause.) The sailing of the Alabama and the Florida — 
the organization of companies to supply arms to shoot down our 
brethren — the organized attempt to break through the blockade 
with every material of Avar and every comfort of life for our ene- 
mies : under the disguise of a neutrality violated at every step — 
the moral power and force given to the rebellion by the counte- 
nance of the governments of France and England, whose fear of 
the consequences, alone, prevented formal intrusion into our 
domestic quarrel — the thorn in our side of Nassau — the prying 
eye that watched our every movement at Halifax — the long thorne 
that France has planted in our side in Mexico — these things fester 
and wrankle till the day of account. (Great applause.) I used 
to be opposed to foreign conquest, opposed to the acquisition of 
territory, opposed to foreign war. I have learned something in 
two years. I take it that the sailing of the Alabama has unset- 
tled the North-eastern frontier. (Applause.) I take it that the 
intrusion of a monarchial power into Mexico has made us feel that 
Mexico is a Republic, and our safety requires its expulsion. (Tre- 
mendous cheering.) I take it, that we feel uncomfortably bound 
in by the Bahama Islands, and that hereafter Nassau will not be 
the pirates nest, to prey on us. (Great applause.) YVhen this 
giant shall have recovered the use of all his faculties, not now like 
a man cloven from head to foot, and wielding scarce any of his 
native power, but restored to his whole manhood, united in his 
absolute vigor, I look with glorying to the day when the black 
regiments shall stream to the capital of the Monteziunas while the 
army of the Potomac becoming the army of the St. Lawrence, 
shall march to Quebec and Montreal. (Enthusiastic applause, 
with great cheering and waving of hats.) And if by the blessing 
of God and the wisdom that shall preside over the Nary Depart- 



29 

ment, our navy shall reach the magnificent proportions of our 
army, and the navy of England shall meet her e<{ual on the seas, 
if it shall only he the will of God that the Nation's great Admiral, 
Dupont, shall live to lead it on the ocean, (applause) then I trust 
to live to hear of the explosion of the hombshells over the dome of 
St. Paul's, and of the arches of London bridge sent into the air. 
(Great applause.) 



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